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IQ was for finding children with learning disabilities.

That's all.

The US Army are the ones who took it and turned it into a measuring stick and subsequently the US educational system followed suit.

See The Mismeasure of Man for a concise history.

Stephen Jay Gould is a hack who set the (real) social sciences back a century with his pie in the sky cultural marxism garbage.

The fact that he's held up as some sort of scholar is a sign of just how corrupted the humanities have become.

Here is an excellent refutation of the above linked "work".

Actually, chimpanzees also get cancer, even if at a much lower rate. Perhaps it has to do with accumulated evolutionary mutations, an hypothesis that has been tested more than once and which finds out differences in the apoptosis mechanism between chimpanzees and humans. Why these differences show up and what are they useful for can be debated: it could be a way for not killing too many of our brains' neurons.

Like a lot of things, there are some ideas that take some getting used to, that can even seem counter-intuitive. And often our immediate emotional reactions differ from our views after a we have had time to digest some information and to think about the topic.

Aubrey de Grey on how and why life extension
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB2LfJjAI9o

Interview
http://80000hours.org/blog/42-living-to-1000-an-interview-with-aubrey-de-grey

Life extension escape velocity concept
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020187

Book "Ending Aging"
http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367074/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346107641&sr=8-1&keywords=aubrey+de+grey

The only acceptable default position in science is "We don't know", every other position (hypotheses) requires reasonable evidence.

We know that there is a limit to what strictly natural processes can cause, e.g. strictly natural cause will never result in something like the mac on my desk.

There is some interesting work being done in this field by some scientists oa by David L. Abel whom summarizes this limitation as “No non trivial algorithmic/computational utility will ever arise from chance and/or necessity alone”.

"The prebiotic syntheses that have been investigated experimentally almost always lead to the formation of complex mixtures. Proposed polymer replication schemes are unlikely to succeed except with reasonably pure input monomers. No solution of the origin-of-life problem will be possible until the gap between the two kinds of chemistry is closed. Simplification of product mixtures through the self-organization of organic reaction sequences, whether cyclic or not, would help enormously, as would the discovery of very simple replicating polymers. However, solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on “if pigs could fly” hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help." --- Leslie E. Orgel, The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060018

See also Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2006.07.003

And if it were to be manned it wouldn't be a return trip so to allow for a sufficient genetic variation the crew needs to be at least 1600 individuals.

Otherwise the risk of genetic degradation would be too great.

Depends on what "too great" means. The Hutterite community in North America, a closed religious community, was founded around 1700 with a founding population of about 400 that was already highly inter-related (compared to world-wide human genetic diversity) and has now increased to 50,000. Genetic studies do show a measurable penalty in fertility and fitness with this high level of inbreeding, but the community is doing quite well nevertheless.

What is more there is evidence of major human populations developing from even smaller founder groups PLoS Biology, June 2005, On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas asserts that "Taken together, the analyses in this study suggest a recent founding of the New World Amerind-speaking peoples by a small population of effective size near 70"

Now the lack of diversity in the immune system of the American Indians later led to an epidemiological calamity when diseases from the Old World were imported 10 or 15 millenia later, but this is an avoidable hazard for interstellar colonists.

But the key difference with a space mission is that there is much we can do to avoid genetic disorders and promote genetic diversity:
* Select colonists (or colonist couples) for genetic diversity,
* Use sperm/ova banks to import gentic diversity,
* Use genomic screening to screen out lethal genes (which can be applied in a number of ways).
These techniques can make inbreeding problems go away entirely.

The science on this is too late for me and my siblings in the college admission process. But when this article coming out, linking Formosan aboriginals with Australian aboriginals genetically, we tested for the marker used and found it.
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030247;jsessionid=4B83F3BC07FF90657C9C95A5ABCCBE02.ambra01
"Traces of Archaic Mitochondrial Lineages Persist in Austronesian-Speaking Formosan Populations"

Affirmative action in it's currently form, it's pretty tough on Taiwanese-American who speak Han languages. However, Pacific Islanders, such as those related to Australian aboriginals, get a boost. And we can back it up with science, now, for the next generation. As those claims are only to become more popular, I can see schools eventually conducting their own genetic tests.

It's worth noting that the robot in the experiment where they evolved the bodies as well, in order to run faster, looks like a shark, with a tail and 2 fins. Fascinating. If they could do the same experiment with the ability to walk instead of only crawling (see video http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchSingleRepresentation.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000292.s006 to see what i'm talking about ) and make them do something that requires hands such as lifting something up, we could see if the optimal forms were humanoid, centaur-like, spider-like etc.

Correct, and here is the original article, for hardcore RTFA'ers http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000292

In this case, their hack could be a-likened to a custom program that executes an executable past the incorrect limitation. Ironically the software not only works correctly, as desired, but it also doesn't conflict with updates in the rest of the software. (I'm sure they'll find some bugs though... I wonder how a human fetus would develop with this code enabled from the start?)

Someone teach me. Going ogling didn't help. :(

In this work, we reveal that, upon correction of the premature termination codon in theta-defensin pseudogenes, human myeloid cells produce cyclic, antiviral peptides (which we have termed "retrocyclins"), indicating that the cells retain the intact machinery to make cyclic peptides. Furthermore, we exploited the ability of aminoglycoside antibiotics to read-through the premature termination codon within retrocyclin transcripts to produce functional peptides that are active against HIV-1. Reawakening Retrocyclins: Ancestral Human Defensins Active Against HIV-1

So they are turning on the intrupted gene

An aminoglycoside is a molecule composed of a sugar group and an amino group.[1]

Several aminoglycosides function as antibiotics that are effective against certain types of bacteria. They include amikacin, arbekacin, gentamicin, kanamycin, neomycin, netilmicin, paromomycin, rhodostreptomycin[2], streptomycin, tobramycin, and apramycin. Aminoglycoside

Potentially with common antibacterial ointments

Given that the endogenous production of retrocyclins could also be restored in human cervicovaginal tissues, we propose that aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides might be useful in preventing sexual transmission of HIV-1.

that could be added to sexual/surgical lubricants like KY jelly; pretty impressive. I don't see where this would effect a fetus anymore than using neomycin ointment would.

The PLoS article

I've always been fascinated by "junk DNA." It *can't* be junk; there is so much we don't know here... In fact, the definition of "junk DNA" is something along the lines of "DNA we have not yet identified" Evolution would not have allowed for the repeated (and repeated and repeated) replication of so much code if it wouldn't have been more costly to simply ignore it. More and more researchers think that these are sequences which had a use in regulation, spacing, etc, and which can be put together in new ways to code for various enzyme complexes... the raw material that new genes can be built from; evolution's toolkit.

What I find really fascinating is this seeming reinforcement of that idea: researchers performing directed evolution, using nature's toolkit to put the raw materials together in useful new ways.

There's a huge demand for computational/quantitative folks in the biological sciences. Plus, the work you do there is freakin' cool (speaking as a theoretical neurobiologist).

You may find the following article in PLoS Biology interesting:

Mathematics Is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology Is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better

The abstract of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).

Phylochronology is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA and paleontology. Here, however, we have living samples with which to make a comparison. Thus, there's the potential to compare not just nucleotide sequence, but differences in morphology, development, and evolvability.

This was already done and published a year and a half ago. You can get the aricle for free http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get -document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000042
It was a pretty big deal back then. Not sure why it's getting rehashed now . . .

Also figuring out biology seems to be a lot harder than figuring out networking, at least there are all kinds of nefarious things but also serendipitous things found. Like one presentation I just heard had a U.S. scientist who announced that they had discovered an entire signalling network in human cells that was like the one found in yeast cells. And apparently more proteins can be encoded than the number of genes, because of alternate orderings (counting from different displacements in the gene, I think, ask a real bioinformatics expert). One talk I heard a year ago that stuck with me was a scientist who had devised a way to find signalling pathways in cells quickly; by forcing the cell to die if certain requirements were not met, he created a parallel computer that allowed him to discover a whole swath at once. There is also a lot of math and statistics, as well as a lot of biological knowledge behind it, it is not strange to see various statistical tests, references to different computer programs they used for analysis, or a mention of simulated annealing (well maybe that one not so often, came up yesterday though).

One interesting thing is that they (the H-Invitational people / Japan Bioinformatics Consortium) have I believe twice held what they call annotation jamborees, much like a hackfest! In 2002 they had 120 scientists gather (mostly Japan but from all over the world) in a big room with a computer per person. They locked them in for 10 days, and annotated IIRC over 20,000 genes, basically doing a figure some man years of work in a week, inputting data so it can be searched, analyzed, and crossreferenced.

They do have a comparison between mouse and human genome there, I wonder if something similar could be done in open source in terms of annotating and indexing a libary of open source code in different languages, really all in one pseudo language would be more useful perhaps. Anyway biologists are learning from computer scientists learning from mathematicians, and someone famous has said that in the future, all science will be computer science.

Bioinformatics people are doing text mining and data mining, but also there are many flavors and types of analysis programs designed to penetrate and match up information as encoded by tiny molecules, folded proteins, genes, and so on. Here are some links to get started. Also note the perl for bioinformatics books, and there was a big oreilly bioinformatics conference archived from 2003 and other links too (see bio.oreilly.org link below).

I cannot speak for everyone, but I can convey what I have heard, that there have long been communication gaps that have held back some of this, actually cultural differences. For example physicists like pure math and biologists deal in dirty, wet things.. when people successfully combine different perspectives in this area [more] discoveries start getting made. In Japan at least they are trying to figure out how to grow more bioinformaticists, since students tend to go only towards either biology or towards computer science (why study twice as hard). But there seems to be a lot of interesting stuff in there for both sides.

PLoS Bio article
some clusty
faq

The former is quite true. Actually, most reviewers aren't paid, period. It's seen as a way to contribute back to the research community. It works reasonably well that way--by the time someone is likely to be asked to review papers, they have quite a few publications under their belt, and they should have some familiarity with the review process.

I disagree strongly with the latter statement. It's been my experience that reviewers are generally highly competent to review the papers that they see. Part of this is down to the journal editorial board--they have to find appropriate reviewers, and perhaps there are some third-string journals that don't have the resources or contacts to find top-rate reviewers.

what the NIH needs to do is set up a publishing system that ANYONE can use and submit their work

Why? Instead of just being able to submit to a hypothetical future NIH journal, anyone is free to submit papers to any journal now. Granted, some journals do charge to publish--generally most will waive those page charges if you can demonstrate genuinely dire financial straits. You're also welcome to self-publish on the web, but then of course you don't get any of the credibility associated with formal peer review.

you get mod points and a team of very fancy reviewers who NIH appoints and have unlimted mod points

Eek. I'm not sure that 'mod points' would be a sufficiently precise tool for this type of review. In conventional peer review, reviewers do indeed offer a recommendation about the fate of a submitted paper. Usually there are three or so categories, roughly "acceptable for publication", "acceptable with significant revision", "not acceptable for publication". However, they don't stop there. Depending on the paper and the perceived flaws or areas for improvement, they will also return anywhere from a few sentences to several pages of comments. If a paper is rejected for publication, it's very useful for a scientist to know precisely why. Were there important controls missing? Is the manuscript inappropriate for the particular journal? Did the reviewer misunderstand the results? Properly reviewing a paper takes a significant amount of time--a few hours minimum, multiplied by the number of reviewers (two or three are typical; I know of very few exceptions.)

Also, where would this pool of highly-competent reviewers come from? Generally, the most up-to-date individuals in any field are very busy doing their own research. They don't have time to do detailed review and "moderation" of thousands of unfiltered web submissions. If you filter submissions past a paid part- or full-time editor, you're essentially right back to the old school peer review process.

those publications e.g. NATURE who charge me to view somone elses work are dead

You can have open publications without abandoning traditional peer review--you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. See for example PLoS Biology. It's an open publication--all articles are available for free, online. I think it's a very promising experiment, and I look forward to the launch of further PLoS (Public Library of Science) titles. Will they kill Nature or Science? Who knows? I'm willing to see how the journal ecology evolves.

The cost of subscriptions to scientific journals are immense and foolish - even from the standpoint of someone who get free access from their institution. I'm often tempted to just give out passwords willy-nilly to anyone who needs them. It strikes me that the majority of publications in my field are owned by a very small number of companies who are not at all inclined to be competitive.

That said, after my free paper subscription to PLOS biology ended, I haven't really looked at the site since. I guess the first few faltering steps have to be taken before it becomes more established and I automatically check it out every month like I look at the Cell/JBC/MCB/Nature/Science/EMBO/PNAS crowd.

This is already happening. Behold PLOS Biology, the Biology journal of the Public Library of Science. This has been around for some years and was started up by Michael Eisen of the Eisen lab at Lawrence Berkeley. As Slashdot history will attest, I found the original introduction of the PLOS to be insipiring and in fact it led me to take up my current career in natural language processing (because someone has to search through all that science!). I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Eisen at a presentation he made at VANBUG recently, and he was very enthusiastic about hearing that NLP people are interested in working on searching and managing open science information, so I again urge you to help out projects like the PLOS (not just Biology, although that's the only current journal).

Here is an example of what Nature and other for-fee journals need to be concerned about. In my opinion, more power to the free and open distribution of knowledge. Let the battle begin based on the value of the journals.

If Nature, the Lancet, and other major journals can justify their prices to their subscribers, more power to them. I would like to see access to science made more open and widespread, so my cheering interest is against them, but I don't begrudge them their efforts. I think that Nature et al are fighting what will ultimately be a losing battle, but the competition cannot be bad for scientists and the public -- let each side fight harder to win attention and business, and hopefully it will drive everyone to greater heights.

GF.

I don't get it. Nature was talking about this for bit now, right? Anyway, Isn't that what PLoS is for? It's not Nature or Science, but it'll be there someday and there are new journals from it of various interests in the wings.

The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.

Hopefully the real experiment is more bulletproof than this fluff piece suggests.

Perhaps the news reporting in the first link qualifies as a "fluff peice", however you could have simply followed the second link - the Complete Research Article. - to see that it was quality science and that your critisism were misplaced.

severe methodological issues... they could be picking up any of a variety of mental processes that have nothing to do with the insight experience. Most obviously, it could merely be the intent to push the button.

That is fully controlled for. I'll cover what they did in some detail for those not familiar with scientific methods.

In studies like this you don't analyze the measurements themselves, you use proper controls and analyze differences between measurements. You set things up so that the only difference will be the difference you are looking for.

If a subject does not report finding a solution within 30 seconds that trial is disarded completely. This means we only look at cases of people who have solved the problem. People who solve the problem always indicated that in an identical manner - with a button press. The fact that the problem was solved is a constant, it was always solved. The intent to press the button is a constant, there was always an intent to press teh button. Physically pressing the button is a constant, the button was always pressed. As an added bonus, it is not merely a button press", it is a double button press. One button in each hand. That avoids any left/right differences in activity.

Those are all constants. Since we are only analyzing differences those constants entirely vanish.

We only look at the brain data for roughly the two seconds before that button press. This time period covers the mental process of solving the problem and always pressing the button.

Two seconds after that button press there is always the question "Answer?" and the subject always speaks the answer they found. Two seconds after that "Insight?" flashed up. Here the the subject may or may not indicate an insight experience, but this is long after the time period we are studying. Any action here has (or should have) no effect at all on the data we already recorded.

If the subject reports a subjective "insight" experience then you take the recorded data and average it into one bucket. Cases indicated as non-insight are averaged in another bucket.

You then subtract one average from the other average. If we haven't screwed up anywhere then the only difference we see should be differences in brain activity while the problem was being solved. We should only see increases or decreases in various brain activity related to insight/non-insight solution processes.

The biggest problem is the fuzzy nature of people subjectivly reporting insight experiences. Different people subjectively interperting it differently can introduce random "noise" into our results. Despite any such niose, a clear and stable difference was seen. Even if different people interperted their experiences differently, there was still some sort of consistant and measurable difference.

-

Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum. For any matter, the entire encyclopedic volume is online, and this appears to be a positive step for scientific writing.

Nope. This is a positive step for scientific writing.

GF.

Long-Lasting Novelty-Induced Neuronal Reverberation during Slow-Wave Sleep in Multiple Forebrain Areas

I think it may be possible to introduce these traits in ways that are not inheritable. However, genes are of course incredibly complex, and it is probably not worth the risk of seriously fucking up the environment just for some glowing fish. If anyone knows whether this really is a possiblity, or if I just dreamed it up, I'd love to hear about it.

GM crops are significantly less clear cut area, with the possible risks being high, but little research to show whether the risks are real. On the other hand, the benefits are quite high (feeding starving children in 3rd world countries). There is a great article on GM corn over at the Public Library of Science.

The study by researchers at Duke in which monkeys with brain implants were able to articulate use of a robotic arm through their thoughts was recently published here (link to PDF download is in the right hand column) in the Public Library of Science. It's pretty amazing work. Wireless control, i.e. Bluetooth implants, are on the horizon. I think the really significant implication of going wireless is that this potentially allows for some sort of communication between individuals who possess the wireless implants. The hard part was whether the neuronal/electrical implant interface would work (i.e. whether a brain could send a signal to manipulate a robotic device). The question to consider is if this goes wireless, will electronically aided telepathy between wireless enabled individuals be far behind?

The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:

(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.

(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.

It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.

A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES

Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:

If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.

Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.

As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.

And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o

These 2 pages have conflicting information:
http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/ http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=sli deshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0000009-g 001
Look at "ShareAlike" and Non-commericial. The symbols are wrong.
Also why did they make the "ShareAlike" symbol very similar to CopyLeft? It confused when I first saw it.....

I stayed up for the Public Library of Science to go online. (Yay!)

ObBeKindServers: The actual article is 16 pages of neurobiology captured in a 3.3MB PDF file. Unless this is your field, you may find 13 of the 16 pages a difficult read.

A 28KB synopsis PDF file is much more accessable to those outside the field: Retraining the Brain to Recover Movement . Check it out first.